Midway Arcade Treasures 3

The GameCube version of Midway's first "themed" retro collection doesn't quite hit it like the others.

It's like clockwork: another year, another Midway collection. This time, though, the company's working a theme into its value pack: for the third addition of Midway Arcade Treasures, Midway is reintroducing eight racing games from the company's intellectual property collection. On the surface, it may seem like a let down that this third edition of the compilation series cuts the usual dozen-plus quantity down to a mere eight. But in reality, many of the eight games within this pack can stand on their own, even in this generation of console gaming. Rush 2049, San Francisco Rush: The Rock and Hydro Thunder are the highpoints to Midway's most worthwhile compilation, but the GameCube version features some conversion issues in these three games that bring down the enjoyment of the compilation.

San Francisco Rush 2049 was clearly meant to headline this compilation pack. Even though the name on this package is "Midway Arcade Treasures," the development team went the smart route and converted the infinitely superior version of the game that was created for the Sega Dreamcast system. Not a knock on the awesome arcade game, but the Dreamcast version, released in late 1999, was one of the deepest and most fulfilling arcade racers of its time, but the GameCube version nearly kills what made the game so awesome to begin with.

Rush 2049 was the sequel to San Francisco Rush, one of the most exaggerated arcade racers ever devised. The simple idea: race through the streets of San Francisco against a pack of opposing drivers while dealing with some of the wildest physics ever implemented in a racing game. Cars could, and frequently did, sail hundreds of feet into the air off jumps and bumps in the street, and San Francisco worked in this fictional recreation because, well, if you've ever seen this city, it's pretty cartoon-like in its terrain all ready. Rush 2049 took the familiar locations and thrusted them 50 years into the future, but in the end the arcade game remained just as far out, crazy, and, most importantly, fun as it was in the original design.

When Midway chose to bring the game to the console six years ago, the development team didn't just port the game over. It improved it with new shortcuts in the track designs, and added several modes of play that increased replay 100-fold. Players could now work through the ranks of the computer AI in a new Circuit Mode, which unlocked hidden tracks and additional features. Also added to the mix was a Ghost Mode where players could record their best run and save them as ghost data, which could then be uploaded to other players' games so other players could race your prime runs. And then there's Stunt Mode, a brilliantly simple creation that exploits the game's physics engine where players try to flip, tumble, and roll through the air for the best score possible. And last, and easily the best, is Battle Mode, a fantastic multiplayer mode where players drive in deathmatch arenas -- this concept was built upon in Midway's 2003 console release: Roadkill.

The game's conversion on the GameCube only spot-on for solo players. Everything that the 1999 release featured is in the Midway Arcade Treasures 3 port, with a smooth 60 FPS rate in single player mode. When kicking it into multiplayer mode the GameCube version chugs with a tremendous amount of slowdown and a reduced framerate, along with a much more squished viewpoint in the two player mode. Though the GameCube benefits from quicker, almost immediate loadtimes, the horrendous handling of multiplayer really brings down the value of Midway Arcade Treasures since much of the enjoyment came in the two, three, and four player modes.

Along with Rush 2049 is the contemporary follow-up to the game that started it all: San Francisco Rush: The Rock. Instead of simply offering an arcade port of the first San Francisco Rush game, the Midway Arcade Treasures 3 design team instead gave the go ahead to the "sequel," which was, essentially, a track-pack update to the first game in the series. The version included in Treasures 3 is a straight-forward port of the arcade game, but in the move from arcade hardware to home console the development team tweaked the engines to run at a higher framerate. The GameCube version doesn't quite hit the 60 frames per second rate that the PS2 and Xbox versions feature, at least most of the time. The GameCube version also features more visual pop-up as players drive through the environments. The benefit: the GameCube version has a bit tighter control with better handling of the analog stick